My Wife is Mostly Dead: A Short Story about Demonic Possession

My wife is mostly dead, I’ll give you that. She’s not totally dead though, so meet me in the middle here. In fairness, I have killed her a bunch of times, so you’d think I’d be able to update that statement to “my wife is entirely dead” but, well, here we are.

I’ve lost track of all the ways I’ve killed her. I’ve stabbed her a few times, but that’s messy and harder to do than movies make it look. Sometimes you miss and hit a shoulder blade or something, and then it’s a whole thing. Shooting works, but she’s immune to normal bullets. If I soak them in the tears of an infant first, they can do some serious damage, but I don’t need to tell you how long it takes to gather enough infant tears to soak a bullet.

Oh, I do? Fine, it takes about 8 months. Babies cry a lot, but as it turns out a ton of their crying is dry crying. Drying. Heh, that’s not bad.

I can see you’re not in the mood for levity. The most reliable way to kill her is fire. I’ll trick her into running through a door where I’ve balanced a pail full of gasoline. It douses her, and I throw a lit match. She screams, and her dying screech will pierce the veil of forever, causing trees to melt and Thursday to turn into bats. Once, a sausage gained sentience, went to a bar and started picking fight, which, when you think about it, is kind of what sausage tastes like, and-

Okay, you’re giving me a look like you think I’m the bad guy here, but I’d like to understand your solution. Every relationship has its unique quirks, right? Ours happens to be that my wife, was recently possessed by a demon. And before you ask, yes, we’ve tried an exorcism. Many, many exorcisms. They don’t work. This demon, he’s got his clutches in there, you know? You get the priest in, he does his thing, “the power of Christ compels you and whatnot”, but it never takes. The only reliable treatment we’ve found for this unfortunate disease is to mostly murder my wife every couple months.

I’ll throw her in the ground in the backyard and she’ll stay there for a couple days, good and dead. In the old days, we’d have a ceremony for her, but the kids lost interest. As my son said, “it’s tough to remain sincere when it’s the eighth funeral for your dead mother.” He’s right. I mean, you can only play “Wind beneath my wings” so many times.

When she comes to and pulls herself out of the shallow grave, the Demon is gone and she’s back to normal. For a while. He’s pesky though, and after a few months, he’ll crank up the possession again. He starts small, levitating lamps and whatnot, but pretty soon he graduates to full on head-rotating, levitating in air, foul stench, the works.

That’s when it’s time to kill my wife, which is what I had done before you showed up.

I’m not sure how long you think you can keep me here for. You’ll need a corpse to book me with murder and I’m confident my wife will be up and running in a couple hours now. You should be getting a call from her soon, she normally posts bail.